Rubrics: Students Like Them!

A recent paper on rubrics for online discussions had some interesting findings and in particular drew out some fantastic student responses about the use of the rubric for grading their online discussions, such as:

"I really appreciated having what was expected clearly documented at the beginning of the course. It let me know what was expected and helped me to prepare for each week. Other classes have seemed extremely arbitrary in their discussion grading and it can be very frustrating. I really enjoyed the way it was setup in this class. Thank you.”

The paper includes two versions of the rubric used and emphasizes several practices which both students and faculty found helpful in implementing and using the rubric: